June 21, 2002
Toogood Reports
There she goes again! Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg -- or as I call her, Dr. Strangelove -- has started a new propaganda cycle. In the June 16 edition of The Scotsman, Nick Peters tarted up Rosenberg’s most recent press release in journalistic drag. Peters’ rewrite job, War on Terror: FBI ‘Guilty of Cover-Up’ over Anthrax Suspect, looks like a real girl -- unless you’re familiar with the species, and look past the pancake make-up to see the stubble.
Peters led with, "AMERICAN investigators know the identity of the killer who paralysed the US by sending anthrax in the post but will not arrest the culprit, according to leading US scientists."
For several months the Federal Bureau of Investigation has claimed it has few leads and little evidence about the group or individual who targeted politicians and media organisations....
At a time when the Bush administration is beefing up America’s Homeland Security defences any indication of progress by the FBI should be good news, but one prominent and well-respected biowarfare expert believes the FBI has not only known the identity of the terrorist for months but has conspired with other branches of the US government to keep it secret.
It is not until the seventh paragraph that Peters mentions Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/Strangelove, who turns out to be the only American scientist behind his story, which is to say, that NO LEADING U.S. SCIENTISTS support his story:
Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the biological warfare division at the Federation of American Scientists, first accused the FBI of foot-dragging in February with a scathing investigation that included a portrait of the possible perpetrator so detailed that it could only match one person.
Rosenberg said she knows who that person is and so do a top-level clique of US government scientists, the CIA, the FBI and the White House.
Note that when Peters finally does name Rosenberg, he does so in such an ambiguous passage, that it is not clear whether he is claiming that the scathing investigation was carried out by the FBI or by Rosenberg.
Dr. Strangelove has typically told one of two different stories, depending on her audience of the moment -- what I call the soft story or the hard one. In the soft story, she tells of how, despite being out of the loop, as a private citizen, she has followed the publicly available trail of evidence, out of which she constructed a profile of the anthrax terrorist. In the hard story, Dr. Strangelove claims to be very much in the loop, and to know the exact identity of the terrorist, who she insists committed acts of terror, murdering five people, on orders from the CIA. She insists, as well, that the FBI has covered up the crime.
Nick Peters comes up with what is for me a new wrinkle, in blending the soft and hard stories: Rosenberg developed a profile, but one which -- in contradistinction to the standard meaning of profile as a type, rather than an individual -- excludes all but one possible suspect. But this is a word game -- you don’t exclude potential suspects based on a profile, but based on facts. Facts: A person’s having an alibi or a lack of access to the toxin. A lack of motive would also tend to exclude someone as a suspect. To exclude all but one possible suspect, presupposes that one is in possession of all of the relevant facts, something that is rarely the case, and an impossibility in this one, because no one knows the names of everyone who had access to Ames strain anthrax.
Rosenberg assumes the anthrax terrorist got his hands on the Ames strain at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. But since 1997, when federal law mandated that all such transactions be recorded with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Fort Detrick has shared Ames strain anthrax spores with researchers at no less than seven institutions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Before 1997, it’s anyone’s guess how many institutions received Ames spores from USAMRIID. The seven institutions we know of for sure are: Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio; Dugway Proving Ground, Salt Lake Desert, Utah; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, Albuquerque; the Defence Research Establishment, Suffield, Canada; and the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research at Porton Down, UK. Note that scientists at Suffield and Porton Down shared the Ames strain with an unknown number of scientists at additional, unreported locations. Note too, that at some point, the Iraqis also acquired Ames strain anthrax.
Nick Peters calls Dr. Strangelove a prominent and well-respected biowarfare expert, but she is neither well-respected nor an expert in biowarfare, and “notorious” is a more accurate adjective than prominent. As Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival showed on March 20, in the first and still the best expose of Rosenberg/Strangelove, she immediately seized on the anthrax attacks as an opportunity to destroy, in one fell swoop, America’s biowarfare defense program, and indeed, U.S. sovereignty. On April 29, David Tell showed in the weekly standard, that Rosenberg was a rank amateur in matters of biological warfare, with a fevered imagination to rival Oliver Stone’s. And as I showed in my June 9 Toogood Reports exposé , rather than having gotten her explanation of the anthrax terrorist’s ID from the FBI, she ripped it off entirely from the brilliant but little-watched Chris Carter TV series, Millennium, which ran from 1996-1999.
But those exposes have so far had little effect on Dr. Strangelove, whose wild tale is comforting to anti-American media outlets, especially those in Europe.
While Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is always identified as a State University of New York professor, that identification is highly misleading. Every state institution of higher education in New York is part of the State University of New York, including community colleges. Would one describe a community college biology professor as a professor at the State University of New York? Of course, not. The only instructors who should be so identified are those who teach at the four state university centers at Buffalo, Albany, Binghamton, and my alma mater, Stony Brook. Of the four, Stony Brook is the biggest center of biological and medical research.
But Dr. Strangelove does not work at a university center, with state-of-the-art laboratories. She does not even teach at a scientifically-oriented four-year college. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg teaches at the SUNY College at Purchase, which is respected for its programs in ... the performing arts. If Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/Strangelove has performed any serious research on biological warfare, I have been unable to find it.
Her Ph.D. and tenured professorship notwithstanding, Rosenberg/Strangelove is no scientist, but rather a political activist who holds the scientific method in contempt.
Dr. Strangelove’s modus operandi is, every month or two, to write a slight variation on the same press release she has been using since late last year, and e-mail it anew to the media and political organizations on her list. It is not clear if she does all her e-mailing at the same time, or hits the Europeans first. What is clear, however, is that the Europeans have always been more receptive to her story, and have even helped her embellish on it. After American reporters see her press release repeated by European colleagues, they jump on the bandwagon. Again and again and again.
As David Tell showed, the BBC was only too happy to unquestioningly help Dr. Strangelove spread her CIA-Millennium story. And as I found, the German TV news magazine, The Monitor, went the BBC one better (my translation):
Microbiologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg knows the results of investigations by U.S. officials. Their analyses have meanwhile unambiguously confirmed their initial suspicion: The anthrax attacker came not from bin Laden’s bioterror laboratory, but rather from an American government lab.
Immediately after discussing Rosenberg’s charges, Monitor producers added embellishments of their own, reporting that
The FBI now has a new, hot clue. And according to information in The Monitor’s possession, it leads straight to the American secret police (Geheimpolizei), the CIA. The FBI is working on the assumption that the criminal is employed by a corporation that experimented with biological weapons for the CIA.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg is the only person to make that claim before or since the Monitor interview. The Monitor producers’ claim of independent corroboration was designed to enhance both their credibility and Rosenberg’s.
Like Dr. Strangelove, Nick Peters is also dressing up a twice-told tale as something new. He opens his story by emphasizing the Jose Padilla story -- though he misspells Padilla’s name as Padile -- and beats on the FBI both for the Padilla case and for the Bureau’s supposed failure to prevent 911.
I say supposed, because the FBI’s failure to stop the 911 attacks was due to its fear of being charged with ethnic profiling. As a socialist, Peters should be applauding the Bureau for its restraint. But in perfect “Heads I win, tails you lose” fashion, Peters condemns the FBI for being insufficiently aggressive in failing to prevent 911, and for being TOO aggressive in nabbing Padile [sic] immediately, instead of waiting for him to procure and detonate a dirty bomb.
Just imagine what Peters would have said, had the FBI failed to catch Padilla in time! ‘Following its failure, in spite of warnings by top field agents, to stop the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the FBI failed to stop the detonation of a dirty bomb in San Francisco. Leading American scientists and biowarfare experts are calling for the agency to be disbanded.’
But Nick Peters’ coldcocking of the FBI was a diversion tactic, to hide the fact that he was re-writing another Dr. Strangelove press release.
Not only has Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/Strangelove borrowed fantasies from TV’s Milliennium, in order to conjure up a home-grown terrorist. She has also ignored a veritable treasure trove of published evidence – which will require at least one column to review – pointing to a foreign terrorist, most likely Al Qaeda, working in concert with the terrorist organization’s September 11 attack on America.
If European and American propaganda officers (aka journalists and editors) are going to keep resurrecting this dead horse of a story, I am perfectly willing to keep kicking it, until it stays dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment